Approaching artmaking as a philosophical enterprise as much as a material practice, Kathryn Andrews (b. 1973, Mobile, Alabama) disrupts staid systems of meaning-making by inviting viewers to join in an active interrogation of the anxieties, fears, and desires that inform the act of looking. To this end, Andrews’s multidisciplinary output—which includes sculpture, installation, performance, and print—mines repositories of cultural objects and images already alive in mass consciousness, both for their rich auratic power and for what they reveal of our collective values.

By marshaling a panoply of subjects across media, from vaudevillian performers to film actors to serial killers to cartoon characters, Andrews floods the referential field, disturbing the viewer’s need to identify locatable subjects in order to produce meaning. At the same time, her aesthetically varied output and excessive semiotic play ridicules the dominant narrative that artworks and their logics are produced by a sole author. Histories of violence, collective imaginaries, art historical referents and materials chosen for their connotative value are strategically deployed in idiosyncratic combinations that invite alternative, open-ended readings. By peeling back the hidden drives that underlie perception, Andrews’s singular provocations turn a critical eye on the ways we elect, whether consciously or unconsciously, to limit our encounters with the symbolic and material world at large—and ask what proliferous new experiences might come from more unbridled modes of attention.

Kathryn Andrews has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2020), MSU Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2017); High Line, New York (2016); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2014); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2013). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Circus Motif in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2023); Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023);  Tense Conditions, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2021); Graphic Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2020–2021); In Production: Art and the Studio System, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2020); Good Dreams, Bad Dreams: American Mythologies, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2016); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015); The Los Angeles Project, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2014); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musuem Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. Andrews lives and works in Los Angeles.